The Icon Thinking of En Hudu Anna and its Tamil Connection

The Icon Thinking of En Hudu Anna

As I started the study of the Bakti literature (after decades of concern with Logic and Epistemology) it was a delight to discover the Icon Thinking, which I recognized as more basic than analogical, metaphorical thinking and so forth.

Such a form of thinking is the essence of Living Hinduism, the Hinduism of ordinary people who go to the temple and in visions of deities, be it in stones copper bronze etc, get solace of a kind and as if they have witnessed the gods themselves. They are certainly naive and possess only what can be called “folk wisdom” but somehow they strike me as more authentically religious compared to the widely read and literature spewing scholars, the caattiram ootukinRa sazakkarkaL (the verbose who only study the sastras) of Appar.

There is something beautiful and alluring about this naivete and this because, I believe, they have an implicit believe in the presence of deities and that they are around there to help the suffering people. I have talked to many uneducated and common people (like my mother who was illiterate) and they also disclose a profound wisdom that you don’t even see among the religious leaders generally and it is the simple understanding that all gods are the same - be it Siva, Muruka, Vinayaka, Turumaal, Krishna etc - they are the same and all deserve to be respected and worshipped! Such simple people can penetrate and go to the depths and see the SAME BEING at the depths of all deities.

I think that this is all because of the basic and primordial Icon Thinking which has been buried by scholastic and analytical concerns of the scholarly and who by that have become very distant to genuine and simple religiosity.

At the moment the Acaryas are the least religious despite their weighty scholarship in selected literature!

My study on the “Icon Thinking of En Hudu Anna’ shows that this form of thinking was there in one of the earliest civilizations in the world, SumeroTamil Civilization and that it was the kind of thinking that formed the basis of culture itself and in that the human culture was forged by the gods themselves by erupting into the human mind and possessing it.

I have studied En Hudu Anna’s immensely beautiful “ Exaltations of In-Anna” that have I called Sirbiyam (c. 2200 BC), using a word that occurs in Sulgi’s Hymn B. The whole text with Tamil renderings is already available in my studies.

What I want to tell is that the Icon Thinking is already available in 'En Hudu Anna' and through that show the very ancient genesis of Bakti that constitutes the essence of Hindu way of life both high and low.

Loganathan Krishnan @ Ullaganar